Borrows - Warren Buffett: The Ultimate Guide To Investing like Warren Buffet. Learn the Warren Buffet Way, the Warren Buffett Portfolio and the Warren Buffett Stocks

Chapter 1 - Warren Buffetts Road to Success

Warren Buffett is known today as a massively successful entrepreneur and investor. However, all successful people had to make their way from the beginning, Warren Buffett included. It is often both inspiring and a key to understanding to look at a successful persons journey to success, and so in this chapter I will go over how Warren Buffett got to the place he is at today, with over 72 billion dollars of net worth. While we all have our own stories and none will be the same as Warren Buffetts, it is still interesting and helpful to see his story, as it gives much necessary background that will help you understand who he is as both a person and businessman, giving you insight for later chapters in which I talk about the Warren Buffett Way, his portfolio, and more.

Warren Buffett was born in 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska. His father was a stockbroker later elected as a U.S. Congressman, causing his family to move to Washington, D.C., which is where Warren Buffett became interested in investing and math. Under his high school senior picture was written: future stockbroker.

Warren Buffett actually began being involved in business at quite a young age; as a child, he was selling gum and magazines around the neighborhood, and at the age of 11, he bought stocks for he and his sister. He bought 3 shares at 38 dollars each, and while their value dropped at first, he refused to sell them, waiting until they rose to 40 dollars to do so. However, eventually the stock value of the stocks he bought rose to over 200 dollars, and he regretted selling them early. Warren Buffett now says that this was a valuable learning experience for him. Warren Buffett was also a math prodigy from a young age, being able to do large amounts of calculations in his mind.

At the age of 13, Warren Buffett filed his very first tax return, and claimed his bike, which he used in his job as a paperboy, as tax deduction. He continued to be extremely economical even as a youth, later on buying an old pinball machine, putting it in a barbershop, and using the profits to buy more, eventually selling his business for over a thousand dollars, while he only spent 25 dollars (to buy the first machine). When he was 14, he bought forty acres of farmland on which a tenant farmer worked for 1200 dollars. By the time Warren Buffett finished college, his savings were 90,000 dollars.

Speaking of college, Warren Buffett attended the University of Pennsylvania's famed Wharton School of Business due to pressure from his father, as Warren Buffett himself would have preferred to continue being actually involved in business rather than attending college. He later transferred to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and after graduating, applied for Harvard Business School and was rejected. Instead, he attended Columbia Universitys business school, since he found out that his hero, Benjamin Graham, taught there.

After graduating from Columbia, he found out that Graham was part of GEICO insurance, and so he aimed to get a job there. After speaking to the vice president of GEICO for hours, the vice president found him extraordinary, and along with Warren Buffetts father, encouraged him not to work on Wall Street. Warren Buffett even offered to work Benjamin Graham without pay, but Benjamin Graham would not allow him to, so Warren Buffett returned to his hometown and started a firm there named Buffett Partnership, where he made many extremely successful investments by buying undervalued companies with stocks that quickly rose. He was dubbed the Oracle of Omaha and became very wealthy.

In 1952, Buffett married Susan Thompson and they had three children together. Warren made more and more partnerships in the meantime, eventually expanding to six, and after meeting Charlie Munger (who would later become his partner), his partnerships expanded even more. He found many partners willing to pool 10,000 dollars each, while he himself invested merely 100 dollars. He was wildly successful and became a millionaire in 1962, merging all of his partnerships into one large one.